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قراءة كتاب Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.

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Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.

Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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individual enterprise, all possible advantages for study under the direction of the best artists are provided, and these are supplemented by scholarships which relieve the student of limited means from providing for daily needs.

All these opportunities are shared by men and women alike. Every advantage is as freely at the command of one as of the other, and we equal, in this regard, the centuries of the Renaissance, when women were Artists, Students, and Professors of Letters and of Law, filling these positions with honor, as women do in these days.

In 1859 T. Adolphus Trollope, in his "Decade of Italian Women," in which he wrote of the scholarly women of the Renaissance, says: "The degree in which any social system has succeeded in ascertaining woman's proper position, and in putting her into it, will be a very accurate test of the progress it has made in civilization. And the very general and growing conviction that our own social arrangements, as they exist at present, have not attained any satisfactory measure of success in this respect, would seem, therefore, to indicate that England in her nineteenth century has not yet reached years of discretion after all."

Speaking of Elisabetta Sirani he says: "The humbly born artist, admirable for her successful combination in perfect compatibility of all the duties of home and studio." Of how many woman artists we can now say this.

Trollope's estimate of the position of women in England, which was not unlike that in America, forty-five years ago, when contrasted with that of the present day, affords another striking example of the expansion of the nineteenth century.


Although no important changes occur without some preparation, this may be so gradual and unobtrusive in its work that the result appears to have a Minerva-like birth. Doubtless there were influences leading up to the remarkable landscape painting of this century. The "Norwich School," which took shape in 1805, was founded by Crome, among whose associates were Cotman, Stark, and Vincent. Crome exhibited his works at the Royal Academy in 1806, and the twelve following years, and died in 1821 when the pictures of Constable were attracting unusual attention; indeed, it may be said that by his exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Constable inaugurated modern landscape painting, which is a most important feature of art in this century.

Not forgetting the splendid landscapes of the Dutch masters, of the early Italians, of Claude and Wilson, the claim that landscape painting was perfected only in the nineteenth century, and then largely as the result of the works of English artists, seems to me to be well founded. To this excellence Turner, contemporary with Constable, David Cox, De Wint, Bonington, and numerous others gloriously contributed.

The English landscapes exhibited at the French Salon in the third decade of the century produced a remarkable effect, and emphasized the interest in landscape painting already growing in France, and later so splendidly developed by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and their celebrated contemporaries. In Germany the Achenbachs, Lessing, and many other artists were active in this movement, while in America, Innes, A. H. Wyant, and Homer Martin, with numerous followers, were raising landscape art to an eminence before unknown.

Formerly landscapes had been used as backgrounds, oftentimes attractive and beautiful, while the real purpose of the pictures centred in the human figures. The distinctive feature of nineteenth-century landscape is the representation of Nature alone, and the variety of method used and the differing aims of the artists cover the entire gamut between absolute Realism and the most pronounced Impressionism.


About the middle of the century there emerged from the older schools two others which may be called the Realist and Idealist, and indeed there were those to whom both these terms could be applied, both methods being united in their remarkable works. Of the Realists Corot and Courbet are distinguished, as were Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau among the Idealists.

Millet, with his marvellous power of observation, painted his landscapes with the fidelity of his school in that art, and so keenly realized the religious element in the peasant life about him—the poetry of these people—that he portrayed his figures in a manner quite his own—at the same time realistic and full of idealism. MacColl in his "Nineteenth-Century Art" called Millet "the most religious figure in modern art after Rembrandt," and adds that "he discovered a patience of beauty, a reconciling, in the concert of landscape mystery with labor."

Shall we call Bastien Lepage a follower of Millet, or say that in these men there was a unity of spirit; that while they realized the poetry of their subjects intensely, they fully estimated the reality as well?

The "Joan of Arc" is a phenomenal example of this art. The landscape is carefully realistic, and like that in which a French peasant girl of any period would live. But here realism ceases and the peasant girl becomes a supremely exalted being, entranced by a vision of herself in full armor.

This art, at once realistic and idealistic, is an achievement of the nineteenth century—so clear and straightforward in its methods as to explain itself far better than words can explain it.


Contemporary with these last-named artists were the Pre-raphaelites. The centre of this school was called the Brotherhood, which was founded by J. E. Millais, W. Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Michael Rossetti. To these were added Thomas Woolner the sculptor, James Collins, and F. G. Stephens. Other important artists known as Pre-raphaelites, not belonging to the Brotherhood, are Ford Madox Brown and Burne Jones, as well as the water-color painters, Mason, Walker, Boyce, and Goodwin.

The aim of these artists was to represent with sincerity what they saw, and the simple sincerity of painters who preceded Raphael led them to choose a name which Ruskin called unfortunate, "because the principles on which its members are working are neither pre- nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting. They are endeavoring to paint with the highest possible degree of completion what they see in nature, without reference to conventional established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of any past epoch. To paint Nature—Nature as it was around them, by the help of modern science, was the aim of the Brotherhood."

At the time when the Pre-raphaelite School came into being the art of other lands as well as that of England was in need of an awakening impulse, and the Pre-raphaelite revolt against conventionality and the machine-like art of the period roused such interest, criticism, and opposition as to stimulate English art to new effort, and much of its progress in the last half-century is doubtless due to the discussions of the theories of this movement as well as of the works it produced.

Pre-raphaelitism, scorned and ridiculed in its beginning, came to be appreciated in a degree that at first seemed impossible, and though its apostles were few, its influence was important. The words of Burne Jones, in which he gave his own ideal, appeal to many artists and lovers of art: "I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms divinely beautiful."

Rossetti's "Girlhood of Virgin Mary," Holman Hunt's "Light of the World," and Millais' "Christ in the House of His Parents" have been called the Trilogy of Pre-raphaelite Art.

Millais did not long remain a strict disciple of this school, but soon adopted the fuller freedom of his later work, which may be called that of modern naturalism. Rossetti remained a Pre-raphaelite through his short life, but his works could not be other than

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